Nature Reviews Genetics 11, 819–829

Figures 3 and 4 of the above article incorrectly showed 'microhomology-mediated break-induced repair' as a type of 'homology-directed repair'. This has been removed from both figures. In figure 3, 'microhomology-mediated break-induced replication' has been inserted under 'paused replication fork' followed by 'collapsed replication fork'. The corrected figures are available at http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v11/n12/full/nrg2883.html.

In the first sentence of the 'Allelic and non-allelic homologous recombination' subsection (p824), gene conversion was incorrectly defined as a name for homologous recombination. This statement has been removed in the corrected version. The revised sentence reads: “Homologous recombination is a DNA double-strand break repair mechanism in which information from a template sequence is used to repair the damage.”

In the 'Allelic and non-allelic homologous recombination' subsection (p824–p826) and in figure 3, 'homologous recombination' was stated when the authors were specifically referring to allelic homologous recombination. 'Allelic' has been inserted into figure 3 (see link above) and these sentences:

“Because allelic homologous recombination does not lead to rearrangements, it could be speculated that such a switch would not increase this form of genomic instability.”

“Allelic homologous recombination can be completed by synthesis-dependent strand annealing (SDSA) or double-strand break repair (DSBR) pathways.”

“Defects in the allelic homologous recombination pathway could result in non-allelic homologous recombination (NAHR), in which non-allelic sequences that share sequence similarity are used for repair.”

The authors apologize for these errors.